“Now it is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily.” — Aristotle, Politics, Book 7
According to Aristotle, the best human societies have government which allows people to reach their individual potential. Over 2,000 years later, another smart person, Albert Einstein, echoed this very same reasoning:
“Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.” — Albert Einstein
If the best human societies are those where individuals each thrive, then we can ask about the specific or peculiar processes which happen to lead to the outcome where people are all — or, at least mostly — thriving. Aristole said that a feature which helps society thrive is middle-class dominance.
According to Aristotle, when compared to those who have enough to live a comfortable life, those who are either very rich or very poor have had more obstacles to surmount before being amenable to reason. Those very rich or very poor are more susceptible to forming factions (colluding with others to obtain an advantage).
If the middle-class is such an important factor of a good society, then you can estimate how good a society is by checking how strong the middle-class is. Back in 1989, the USA had this signature of being a good society, because — unlike elsewhere — the middle-class wealth was over 1.5 times greater than the wealth of the top 1%:
The 40% of people from the 50th percentile up to the 90th percentile are taken to be the middle-class in this analysis. But by 2014, the wealth of the top 1% surpassed all of the wealth held by the middle-class, a group which was, numerically, 40 times larger. One wonders how a nation can fall from grace by as much as the USA has recently.
Restoration
To restore the balance, you’d ask what had changed between 1989 and 2014. One big difference is the size and scope of government. By 2014, the US government had grown so unconstitutionally-pervasive that it had even gotten into the business of health care — with passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Besides giving really good clues as to what is needed for a good human society, Aristotle even helped guide people on how to make their own best choices — so that they won’t get led astray by political demagogues who use propaganda on them. One good rule for choosing between two alternatives is this one:
“Also, A is more desirable if A is desirable without B, but not B without A: power (e.g.) is not desirable without prudence, but prudence is desirable without power.”— Aristotle, Topics, Book 3
Having prudence is like having wisdom or like taking the proper precautions in life and being practical and maximizing the chances of your success. Notice how, even if you did not have any power over others, it is still a good thing to be practical.
But notice how power without any practicality is less choiceworthy. If having one thing alone (without the other) is really good, but having the other thing alone is not so good, then it logically proves that the first thing is more choiceworthy.
In any contest between those two choices, power and prudence, you should choose prudence (if you want to be happy and successful in life). On a scale that encompasses all of society, one rendition of the top values held might look like this:
In this particular ordering of the values held in a society, liberty is at top and justice is served. It even works out well when a subordinate value has gained ground, like this:
In this particular ordering of the values held in society, fraternity grew, but liberty is still considered more choiceworthy than fraternity is — so justice is still served. If fraternity became more important than liberty, justice becomes impossible, because fraternity leads to factions who grab power for the advantage of their group.
An excessive amount of fraternity was characteristic of the fascism of NAZI Germany.
You even get into trouble — losing justice — when equality is broadly considered more choiceworthy than liberty, such as is true in all Communist nations:
By using Aristotle’s rule for choosing between two options, Liberty wins in a head-to-head comparision against either equality, or fraternity, or even security.
Imagine having total safety and security, but being chained to the floor and unable to even hug your family or express yourself with art. Total security becomes worthless to you then.
But having liberty is valuable and choiceworthy even in the absence of security. Ben Franklin, another smart person, once warned about giving up liberty for security.
There is a process to follow to restore liberty and justice for all Americans, and there are markers or guidelines telling you whether headway is being made (whether you are following the process correctly).
One marker is the ratio of held wealth between the middle-class and the top 1%. When society has good government, the middle-class prospers immensely.
When the middle-class is being gutted out, it indicates that you are governing wrong. Let’s follow the advice of the sages-through-the-ages, such as Aristotle, Einstein, and Ben Franklin. New policies like the Great Reset can be put to the test:
—Does it further entrench power at the top, harming the Middle-Class even more?
—Does it restrict liberty for the purpose of obtaining fraternity, equality, or security?
If so, then say “No”— because the option to have a Great Reset is not choiceworthy. Let’s make America into a good society again, for the benefit of our children, at least.
Here’s a long paraphrase of Aristotle’s focus on the middle-class being the hallmark of a good human society:
For [a man of moderate wealth] is readiest to obey reason, while for one who is [very wealthy or very poor] it is difficult to follow reason. The former sort tend to become arrogant and base on a grand scale, the latter malicious and base in petty ways; and acts of injustice are committed either through arrogance or through malice” (1295b4). A political community that has extremes of wealth and poverty “is a city not of free persons but of slaves and masters, the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt. Nothing is further removed from affection and from a political partnership” (1295b22). People in the middle class are free from the arrogance that characterizes the rich and the envy that characterizes the poor.
Reference
[top 1% wealth share] — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) [WFRBST01134], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
[middle-class wealth share] — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Share of Total Net Worth Held by the 50th to 90th Wealth Percentiles [WFRBSN40188], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSN40188
[Aristotle, Topics] — https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/topics.html
[Aristotle, Politics] — https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.html
[Aristotle on the pivotal nature of a Middle-Class] — https://iep.utm.edu/aristotle-politics/